| Tristan McConnell |
GARAMBA NATIONAL PARK, DR Congo (AFP) – André Migifuloyo and Djuma Uweko lived together, worked together and last October died together fighting to protect Congo’s elephants from voracious ivory-seeking poachers.
In the continental war to protect Africa’s elephants, the rangers of Garamba National Park in north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo are manning the frontline.
The two men grew up in the same small town of Dungu and joined the park service in their early twenties, a good job that pays a decent monthly wage of around $200 (180 euros).
Migifuloyo became a ranger in 2011 and two years later Uweko followed. Both were quick to make friends with others and lived with their young families in Nagero, the park village by the Dungu River with its little red brick church and thatched homes.
In his spare time Migifuloyo, 26, enjoyed war films. Uweko, 27, liked a beer. Both earned reputations for discipline and courage in the field.
Elephants stand together in the Garamba National Park in north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. AFP
On a sweltering Monday afternoon in early October they were part of a 10-man patrol that ran into a large gang of poachers in the north of the park.
Almost as soon as the firefight began Uweko, armed with an AK-47, was shot. Migifuloyo was fatally hit moments after firing off a rocket-propelled grenade.
Uweko dragged himself into the thick elephant grass where he lay bleeding until the poachers found him, and shot him dead. Two others also died: one in the initial exchange of fire while the other, like Uweko, was wounded then executed.
Dieudonné Komorewa, 33 and a ranger for nearly eight years, was Migifuloyo’s close friend and second cousin.
“I could tell he was a disciplined person, and brave, from the start,” Komorewa said. “He was fun to be around.”
The day before his friend was killed they had gone shopping together for baby clothes for Migifuloyo’s unborn child. Most days Komorewa takes up his dead friend’s toddler son to play with his own children.
“I love that kid so much,” he said.
Komorewa remains a determined ranger. “The enemy is the enemy and everything we do here is against them. We mustn’t be scared of them, we must always be ready,” he said.
Who the enemy is varies.
Sometimes it is members of the ragtag yet brutally effective rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), more often it is armed groups from South Sudan or pastoralist-poachers from Sudan or Central African Republic, or occasionally unknown shooters in helicopters who kill the elephants with a bullet in the top of the skull.
Every year more than 30,000 elephants are poached in Africa, according to conservationists, leaving around 450,000 in the wild while the illegal ivory trade their tusks supply is estimated to be worth $3 billion (2.7 billion euros) a year.
The poachers are killers, so African Parks, the South Africa-based, European Union-backed conservation organisation that manages Garamba, has brought in military trainers and a helicopter to help level the battlefield.
The 120 park rangers – a quarter of what’s needed to patrol the 12,400 square kilometre (4,800 square mile) park, about half the size of Wales – are looking more and more like the paramilitary force they must be to win the ivory war.
The post In Congo, a war for Africa’s elephants appeared first on Borneo Bulletin Online.